Posts Tagged «military»

DARPA, on the back of the US government’s BRAIN program, has begun the development of tiny electronic implants that interface directly with your nervous system and can directly control and regulate many different diseases and chronic conditions, such as arthritis, PTSD, inflammatory bowel diseases (Crohn’s disease), and depression. The program, called ElectRx (pronounced ‘electrics’), ultimately aims to replace medication with “closed-loop” neural implants, which constantly assess the state of your health, and then provide the necessary nerve stimulation to keep your various organs and biological systems functioning properly.

Researchers in China are reporting that they’ve taken a big step towards creating a supersonic submarine. This technology, which could just as easily be applied to weaponized torpedoes as military or civilian submarines, could theoretically get from Shanghai to San Francisco — about 6,000 miles — in just 100 minutes. If all this doesn’t sound crazy enough, get this: This new advance by the Chinese is based on supercavitation, which was originally developed by the Soviets in the ’60s, during the Cold War.

It must be the season for exploding rockets: The US Army’s experimental Advanced Hypersonic Weapon, which will eventually be able to bomb anywhere in the world within an hour, exploded just four seconds after launch in Alaska. Similar to last week’s self-detonating SpaceX rocket, the US Department of Defense detected an error within the system shortly after launch, and thus decided to detonate the entire thing rather than risk any extra collateral damage. No one was injured by the incident, though falling debris did damage the rocket’s Kodiak Launch Complex.

I think we can all agree that the physicists, engineers, and chemists who worked on the Manhattan Project — which ultimately ended World War II — were consummate geniuses and paragons of professionalism. Except they weren’t. The demon core of plutonium claimed numerous lives at Los Alamos due to sloppy science.

It might look like some kind of crazy machination that adorned the cover of Popular Aviation back in the ’60s, the flying machine pictured above is the real deal. Developed by NASA, GL-10 Greased Lightning is an unmanned hybrid-electric aircraft that can swivel its wings and engines — into the vertical position for vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), and then horizontal for conventional flight. The fairly recent advent of electric propulsion — thanks in large to the growing power and energy density of batteries — allows for some very efficient hybrid-electric aircraft designs that could finally replace the current (massively inefficient) king of VTOL: the helicopter.

This morning I found myself pondering a particularly interesting question: Where are all the nuclear-powered cars, ships, and planes? Nuclear power is cleaner than fossil fuel power, it generates more power than fossil power (i.e. it goes faster) while weighing significantly less, and you can go years without ever having to refuel a nuclear vehicle. Imagine if you could buy a nuclear-powered Tesla Model S or Ford Escape, and never had to refuel it for the entirety of its operational life. So, where are all the nuclear vehicles? Were they kiboshed by the ecologists? Is it yet another conspiracy hatched by Big Oil to maintain their juicy fossil fuel profits?

Researchers in the US, funded by the US military and the National Science Foundation, have managed to turn air into an “optical fiber.” This breakthrough allows the scientists to turn thin air into an optical waveguide, allowing for much better transmission of lasers through free space — much in the same way that glass and plastic waveguides allow for efficient transmission of laser light over long stretches of optical fiber. As you might have guessed from the US military’s involvement, this could be big news for laser weapons — but there are repercussions for laser-based communications and scientific research as well.

Air Force One — the US President’s flying fortress — which has been using the same clunky handsets since the Reagan administration in the ’80s, has finally received some slick new phones that are much more in keeping with Obama’s 21st century aesthetic. These new phones — customized versions of the the Airborne Executive Phone (AEP) — are provided by military contractor L-3 Communications, and they probably cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each. In what must surely be some of the best news the President has received in the last couple of years, while the old system consisted of two different phones — one for secure communications, the other for non-secure — each AEP is capable of making calls in either mode from a single handset.

Malaysia Airlines flight 17, a Boeing 777 carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew, has been shot down over Ukraine. Yes, this is the same Malaysia Airlines that lost flight 370 in the Indian Ocean earlier in the year. It isn’t yet confirmed who shot down the plane, but we have a military source who believes it was probably Ukrainian separatists, using a Buk missile system that was given to them by the Russians. Suffice it to say, if Ukrainian separatists have just blown up a commercial airliner using a Russian weapon, we are almost certainly looking at a massive geopolitical crisis.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.